Observing Galaxies with Binoculars in the Spring by Vincent S. Foster
Although galaxies are the most distant objects in the universe, many of them can be observed with simple binoculars. For example, M81 and M82, which are 12 million light years away, can be readily observed in 10x50 binoculars. While most galaxies are telescope objects, there are over 75 galaxies with magnitudes brighter than 10, which are well within binocular range. Nearly all can be observed in the spring. Although the views of these galaxies won’t compare to those in a large Dobsonian telescope, binoculars are much more portable and easier to use. It’s also amazing to consider that you are viewing gigantic objects millions of light years away with a small instrument held
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One of the best galaxy pairs for binoculars is formed by the M81 and M82 in northern Ursa Major. Both of these galaxies are bright with magnitudes of 6.9 and 8.4 respectively. They lie little more than a moon’s width apart. In the 10x50 binoculars, M81 appears as a small oval nebulosity surrounded by a diffuse halo of much fainter light aligned N-S. M82 is a thin spindle of silvery light in an E-W elongation and measures 11.2’ by 4.6’, which is small in comparison to M81’s impressive dimensions of 25.2’ by 14.1’. Both of these galaxies form the heart of the Ursa Major Galaxy Group, which includes NGC 2403, which lies 14 degree W-SW of the M81-82 pair in the star-poor wastes of western Camelopardalis. NGC 2403 shines at magnitude 8.4 and is quite large measuring 17.8’ by 11.0’. In 10x50 binoculars it appears as a small, bright, elongated core surrounded by a compact elliptical halo. One of the finest galaxies in the spring is the beautiful face-on spiral M101. Spanning 26.9’ by 26.3’, M101’s relatively bright magnitude of 7.7 is so spread out that the galaxy’s surface brightness is extremely low. Unless you are observing under very dark skies, you may not see it, at least not without carefully searching for …show more content…
Nicknamed the Black Eye Galaxy, its magnitude is 8.5 and its dimensions are 9.3’ by 5.4’, which make it visible as an elongated disk. This galaxy is easy to find since its lies just 1 degree E-NE of the 5th magnitude star 35 Comae Berenices. M106 is the best of the three galaxies measuring an enormous 18.2’ by 7.9’. It is a sharply defined spindle elongated SE-NW and immersed in a uniformly bright halo of nebulosity. M106 lies in a rather star-poor field about 4 degrees east of Chi Ursae Majoris, so locating it may be a bit of a challenge. A galaxy pair rivaling M81 and M82 is made up of M65 and M66 which are separated by only 21’ and found about 2.5 degrees S-SE of Theta Leonis in the constellation Leo. M66 is a spiral galaxy measuring 8.7’ by 4.4’ with a magnitude of 9.0. M65 spans some 10.0’ by 3.3’, shines at magnitude 9.3 and is clearly visible as a tiny patch elongated NW-SE. NGC 2903 is a large spiral galaxy found to the west of Epsilon Leonis at the tip of Leo’s sickle. Binoculars display it as a nebulous 5’x3’ patch highlighted by a brighter central
Two men named Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis has a debate in 1920 that is still important today for changing how we think about galaxies. They talked about five important things. The first thing they debated was how big our galaxy, the Milky Way, is. Shapley said that the Milky Way was much bigger than we first thought, 100,000 light-years across, and that, because it was that big, it had to be the only one. Curtis said the the Milky Way was smaller than that, and that other galaxies existed past ours. They were both right and both wrong. Shapley was right about the size of the Milky Way, and Curtis was right about there being many more galaxies in the universe.
Waller, William H. The Milky Way: An Insider's Guide. Princeton, N.J: Princeton UP, 2013. 42+. Print.
Who has not ever, even if just for a brief moment, looked up at a dark but vividly lit starry night sky and wondered how far those seemingly little lights reach, and if that beauty goes on forever, or if it ends at some point. I believe this question has been pondered by mankind since our creation, and early astronomers are proof of this pondering. Telescopes began as a way for these early astronomers to chart the stars and planets and their movements as they searched for more than what just the naked eye could offer them. In the early 17th century, craftsman began making telescopes, though the tools to invent them had been available for centuries before. Early telescope were called spyglasses and needed improvement. Galileo's Optic Tube, also known as the Galilean telescope is an example of the early creation of refracting telescopes. There were a few different makers and models of refractor telescopes but it was soon discovered they could make a better telescope. With the beginning of the 18th century came the reflecting telescope, which is also called a reflector; an optical telescope that uses either a single curved mirror, or a combination of curved mirrors. There are many types reflecting telescopes: there is the Gregorian telescope, the Cassegrain telescope, and the Ritchey–Chrétien telescope. But today, we are going to be talking about one telescope in particular; "the 200 inch Hale Telescope, which for decades stood as the largest telescope on the planet"(1), from 1948 to 1976. The Hale telescope opened up the skies in ways we never imagined.
Binoculars - A tool you look into used to make things look closer than they are so you can see it more clearly.
Every day we look into the night sky, wondering and dreaming what lies beyond our galaxy. Within our galaxy alone, there are millions upon millions of stars. This may be why it interests us to learn about all that we cannot see. Humans have known the existence of stars since they have had eyes, and see them as white glowing specks in the sky. The mystery lies beyond the white glowing specks we see but, in the things we cannot see in the night sky such as black holes.
In order to understand the large numbers used to express the vast distances discussed in astronomy, one needs to relate these numbers to everyday life. During everyday conversation, people may say things like “the national debt is trillions of dollars,” “the lottery is up to 31 million dollars,” or “John Doe is a billionaire.” An astronomer might say that “one astronomical unit equals 93,000,000 miles or that a light-year is 5,870,000,000,000,000 miles.” The human comprehension level of all of these terms is probably nowhere near the actual truth behind how large these numbers really are. To obtain a feel for these gigantic distances used by astronomers, Astronomy Magazine writer, John P. Wiley says it may be helpful to keep in mind that it takes thirty-one years to count to one billion at the rate of one number per second. He also puts a voyage to a galaxy that is a billion light-years away into perspective by calculating how long it would take to get there in a vessel speeding along at 18,000 miles an hour. The trip would take 37 trillion years. When discussing galaxies and quasars, billions are the smallest numbers used (56,57).
Because of his discoveries and eighteen years of experience teaching at Padua, Galileo grew more and more famous, and his salary had almost tripled. Galileo caught word one summer afternoon of a mechanism that existed in the Netherlands that could make distant objects appear closer. Intrigued by the idea, he decided to make one of these contraptions of his own. To do this, Galileo used spectacle lenses, which at first only magnified things two to three times their size, but Galileo then improved this to eight or nine times their size
Centuries ago, people gazed into the night sky wondering what it was that they were looking at. When astronomers first started to study the night sky, like Galileo, Copernicus and even modern day astronomers, they all shared one goal, and that was to see further than anyone has ever before. The invention of the Hubble Space Telescope changed the study of astronomy forever. Astronomers were seeing and learning more in just days of the launch of the telescope than past astronomers had in their lifetimes. The Hubble Space Telescope is the most technologically advanced telescope to enter space. Its advanced technology has made it possible to obtain countless amounts of data about space and open many doors in the exploration of space. Its accuracy has and still is proving/debunking the myths of space.
In 1608 Hans Lippershey looked at Jupiter through a thin tube shaped object similar to a telescope. Galileo improved the telescope made by Hans in 1609 by adding a convex lens in the front. The telescope was built with a concave eyepiece and convex lenses. Telescopes were used for improving maps and figuring out the positions and motions of stars early on. Scientists believed that the bigger the lens of a telescope the better, so a man named George E. Hale had created a 100 inch telescope which was finished in 1917. Around the 1920s Edwin Hubble had looked through the telescope towards the sky and had discovered that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was not the only galaxy. He also discovered that our galaxy was expanding. Fifty years later the Hubble was funded to be built. The Hubble was supposed to be launched in 1983, but didn’t end up going into space until 1990. NASA launched the Hubb...
The principle behind the refractive telescopes is the use of two glass lenses (objective lens and eyepiece lens) to gather and bend parallel light rays in a certain way so that the image fits the size of the eye's pupil. Light rays is gather through the opening of the telescope called the aperture and passes through the objective lens and refracts onto a single point called the focal point. From there the light rays continue the same direction until it hits the eyepiece lens which also refract the light back into parallel rays. During the process, the image that enters our eyes is actually reverse of the original image and magnified because the size in which we preceive the image.
The Hubble Telescope is the world’s first space-based optical telescope. The Hubble telescope received its name from American astronomer Dr. Edwin P. Hubble. Dr. Hubble confirmed an ever expanding universe which provided the basic foundation of the Big Bang theory. The first concept of the Hubble telescope came from Lyman Spitzer in 1946 who at that time was a professor and researcher at Yale University, Professor Spitzer believed that Earth’s atmosphere blurs and distorts light and a space orbited telescope would be able to surpass this problem. He spent nearly all of his life dedicated to making this concept into a reality. (http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/)
The Orion Nebula is one of the closest stellar regions to the Earth. Using parallax measurements, it has been estimated that this nebula is only 1,500 light years away. In addition, the Orion Nebula is a relatively young star cluster, with an approximate age of less than one million years. It has even been speculated that some of the younger stars within the cluster are only 300,000 years old.
The Universe is a collection of millions of galaxies and extends beyond human imagination. After the big bang, the universe was found to be composed of radiation and subatomic particles. Information following big bang is arguable on how galaxies formed, that is whether small particles merged to form clusters and eventually galaxies or whether the universe systematized as immense clumps of matter that later fragmented into galaxies (Nasa World book, 2013). A galaxy is a massive area of empty space full of dust, gases (mainly 75% Hydrogen and 25%Helium), atoms, about 100-200 billion stars, interstellar clouds and planets, attracted to the center by gravitational force of attraction. Based on recent research, 170 billion galaxies have been estimated to exist, with only tens of thousands been discovered (Deutsch, 2011).
A website called study.com states that, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble used the 100-inch Hooker telescope in Southern California to study the Andromeda Galaxy. He took pictures of faint galaxies and studied them. Eventually, he was able to calculate the velocity for the galaxy and show that everything is
Due to the nature of a sphere, the light will actually not all be focused exactly towards the focus. Instead, light near the edge of the lens will be focused just before the focal point on the optical axis, and light near the center of the lens will be focused just after the focal point on the optical axis. This produces an image that looks blurry or “out of focus”. The simplest way to prevent spherical aberration is to rather than using a spherical lens, use a parabolic lens. Parabolic lenses have exactly the right shape as to focus the light to a central point. The downside of this is that parabolic lenses are significantly more challenging to make than spherical lenses, so for most cheaper telescopes, other methods are used. Some telescopes eliminate spherical aberration by using two different lenses that have equal, but opposite spherical aberration, so that the aberration cancels itself out and the image appears